For External Use Only

Friday, February 13, 2009

I want life!

What great times are upon us. The masses are losing their shitty jobs, and my hours have been reduced to 20 per week which is enough to keep me in beer and pizza for the foreseeable future. Take our shitty jobs and send them to China and let us develop a mass of labor that refuses to do shitty jobs, that refuses to work in a bottling plant, slaughter house, car factory, food processing plant or any other type of plant that makes anything at all. Man was not meant to be bending over a machine his days filled with work a monkey could do, no offence to monkeys because they would not do it. No, it takes a strangely ignorant beast with only a concern for his stomach to get up each morning and wander into some vast cave and spend his day turning out shoddy, unimaginative consumer good, diapers, and bows for teddy bears. All useful things I am sure, but to dedicate one's days to their manufacture, distribution, marketing, purchase, and disposal is a sin against everything man could be. Is there any product worthy of my life? Yes, to be sure we need goods: books, art, art books, wine, cheese, decent food, artfully made clothing, and places to gather, but do we need gadgets that take us away from our fellows, that separate us from our neighbors? Life has become an escape from being human as we spend our days locked in our houses, cars, offices, factories, never touching the earth or feeling a part of anything that does not cost money. The economy! Fuck the economy. Burn it all down and start over. Let the weeds crack our roads and collapse our bridges if it helps me know my neighbor, helps me know the life of a person two doors down that I see once a year, but whose name I do not know. What is this life of looking at screens, this life of unmediated experiences. Would it not have been a better place if the native Americans had kept their land and their ways. Did they ever kill 100,000 in a day? Did they every pollute their own family so they could get a $1 an hour more in pay? I am getting close to refusing this life of work and empty play, this life of fools shouting their slogans. I want nothing, but what I can make or earn by honest labor. Where is the living in this life? Where is the screaming in the night, the massaging of slain deers blood into my bare chest. I want life!

Monday, February 09, 2009

A New Life

Is it possible for humans to continue to exist when our entire existence is based upon violence towards others and our planet? What would happen if those that supply us with what we need to sustain our economy decided not to do business with us, wouldn’t we attack them and take what we require? Isn’t that the entire point of our military, and haven’t we done this a hundred times in the past? Our lives are not sustainable because we waste energy and resources at such an extreme level? We justify the waste by believing it is our right, and that without waste the economy cannot continue to function. Our economy is based upon waste. We are encouraged to waste, encouraged to buy what we do not need, encouraged to throw away what is still useful to buy the new thing. We are all part of system that is destroying the lives of millions so we can have cheap computers, TVs, and the rest of the detritus to which we have become accustomed. How did it come to this level of waste? We have sacrificed our lives to the accumulation of things. We define our existences by the things we have around us, but then who are we when these superficialities are what define us. We have become consumers? We define ourselves by our ability to consume the right things so we appear to be “successful” compared to those around us. Our only value is in how much we are able to stimulate the economy. I don’t want to be an economic entity whose only measure of value is his ability to turn his time, his flesh, his existence into money? But how to check out? How to stop? How to learn and understand what it means to live a meaningful life that is not based upon my participation in this empty consumer economy, and how to do that while maintaining the extravagant lifestyle to which I am accustomed?